The fabrication of men's and women's dress shoes and casual shoes today is a capital-intensive business due to the need for expensive machinery and the use of skilled technicians in the step-by-step process of assembly of the shoes from the many individual components. This leads to higher cost shoes, and places a squeeze on the profit margins of the manufacturers and marketers of traditional footwear. It also has put dress shoes at a disadvantage to ones made of plastic, rubber and fabric, e.g., sport shoes worn as casual shoes, to the detriment of the traditional footwear industry.
For the shoe manufacturer, the shoe marketer and the shoe consumer it is considered an advantage to have a basic design of shoe which can be caused to have a substantially different appearance with only a modest expenditure.
Accordingly, various ways and means have been proposed for providing this advantage to one or more of these interests. One way that a basic design of shoe can be substantially changed in appearance is to offer it with various styles, types, colors and/or quality-grades of heel. If the various designs of heel for a basic design of shoe are permanently applied during manufacture of the shoe, then the manufacturer may be the only one to derive a substantial benefit, although the marketer and consumer may be enabled by this rationalization of the manufacturing process to afford a better grade of shoe, if some of the economy is passed on down to the marketer and consumer. It appears that a substantial majority of prior inventions in this field relate to systems in which the heels and heel-needing shoes may be largely separately manufactured, but once assembled to one another at the factory are meant to stay assembled for the life of the shoe. In these cases the shoes are not meant to be easily provided with new or different heels either for fashion or renewal purposes. Thus, the marketers and consumers of shoes have been largely or wholly denied the benefits of being able to substantially alter the appearance of a basic design of shoe by easily selecting a heel to be assembled with a basic design of heel-needing shoe, or to exchange the existing heel with another which looks different, is newer, is higher or lower, is more elegant or more sporty, is slimmer or more blocky, is of one color or another, is make of a more or less expensive covering material, matches one wardrobe, or another, and the like.
Accordingly, in my earlier-filed, copending U.S. patent application, Ser. No. 300,515, I have described a shoe with a removably mounted heel. According to my earlier invention, a basic design of heel-needing shoe is provided having a sole member made of semi-rigid molded plastic material including a thickened heel stub or jack portion having a downwardly-tapering outer perimetrical sidewall extending about the back and the lateral sides, and a downwardly-opening cylindrically-walled centrally-located socket. The upper surface of the sole member overlying this thickened portion is preferably provided with a small-diameter opening axially communicating with the wall. The upper end of the heel is provided with a centrally located axially upwardly projecting cylindrical boss, preferably centrally provided with an upwardly opening threaded bore. The boss is surrounded by a flat upper end surface. An upstanding flange extends about the back and sides of this end surface. The inner surface of this flange tapers to match the heel jack. The heel is disassembly assembled to the basic heel-needing shoe by inserting the heel boss into the jack socket and threading a screw through the sole opening into the boss bore. Two designs of shoe/heel visible interface are shown.